Melanie Smollin | 5 months ago | Comments (0)
From the day President Obama gave his first major “education speech” last March, the current administration made it perfectly clear that tying teacher evaluations to student performance will be a priority in the national reform agenda. In fact, application guidelines for the $4.35 billion Race to the Top funds dictate that states will be eliminated from competition if they prohibit linking student achievement data to teacher and principal evaluations.
As I mentioned in previous posts, using student data to evaluate, reward and penalize teachers is a complex issue that generates heated debate and valid arguments from both sides.
On the one hand, the current practice of treating teachers like interchangeable widgets just doesn’t make sense. There has to be some way of evaluating performance, so that the best teachers can be supported and retained, the worst teachers (who should never have chosen the profession in the first place) can be dismissed, and the majority of teachers who show up to classrooms each day wanting to do their best can be coached and inspired to do even better. And it’s hard to imagine evaluating teachers with little or no regard for the impact their work has on student progress. (That’s like evaluating the performance of sales people by looking at their sales presentations only—without considering the number of people who actually buy the product.) Have you ever heard of an “excellent” teacher whose students hardly make any progress during the year and begin the following grade level totally underprepared? It just makes no sense. More
